Islamic faith dictates that prayer uttered five times every day brings man face to face with his five "phases," or states of mind resulting from the tension of workaday life: fear and desire, love and grudge, faith and pain, screams and sobbing, and passion and hate. Since every encounter in Islamic life is said to create new pain-whether that of growing up, growing old, or merely getting by-then prayer is the panacea for the inevitable tragedy that is life. In Turkish director Reha Erdem's sumptuously composed fourth feature, life in a rural village on a mountain overlooking the sea is the incubator for an examination of that pain as experienced through the eyes of three very different children: Ömer, the son of the local imam; his best friend, Yakup, who's enamored with the village schoolteacher; and Yildiz, who is forced to balance her studies with the household needs of her demanding mother. Their youthful internal struggles play out against a natural backdrop of passing hours, changing seasons and rural tradition, stunningly captured in widescreen by gifted cinematographer Florent Herry. Add to this evocative mix a musical score culled from the works of Arvo Pärt, and Erdem's award-winning feature (the film earned a top prize at last year's Istanbul Film Festival) emerges as one of the more thoughtful depictions of childhood and rural life in recent memory. Featuring a winsome cast of nonprofessional children, Times and Winds offers an unforgettable glimpse of rural Islamic life that is at once timeless, out of time, and transfixed-like so many works of its kind-by the futile search for lost time.